11.24.08

Ladies and gentlemen, start your dragging!

Posted in Camino at 9:14 pm by Smokey

For several months now, I’ve been alluding to Sean Murphy’s latest big project. I’ve been reluctant to mention the project in more detail because every time I’ve gotten excited about this particular feature in the past, the patch has been derailed, either by other commitments on the part of the author or by release deadlines and reluctant minusing (and also because Sean’s first big feature for Camino 2 was stillborn due to licensing issues), and I didn’t want to jinx this effort. Today I’m extremely pleased to reveal that I have just landed Sean’s patch to enable tab dragging; tomorrow’s (23 November) Camino 2.0b1pre nightly will contain the feature.

As you’ll doubtless notice, tab dragging is not yet perfect; we have a number of follow-up bugs filed already to polish the implementation and fill in the gaps. Due to limitations in Gecko 1.9.0, it’s unlikely that Camino 2 will support dragging tabs out of one window to create a new one, but most of the other limitations should be addressable, within the limitations of volunteer time.

Tab dragging has been the most-voted bug in Camino for some time and was one of our oldest open bugs (filed by sairuh in August of 2002!), so it’s been a long time coming. Desmond Elliott wrote the first testable implementation back in the summer of 2006 (when he also wrote the scrolling tab bar), four years after the bug was filed. Jeff Dlouhy picked up the baton in October of 2007, producing a few testable implementations (and two different approaches, code-wise) by February 2008, when it was clear dragging couldn’t make Camino 1.6 deadlines. Stuart Morgan, Håkan Waara, and Sean himself served as reviewers at various stages in the process, and many of us opened our mouths with design ideas. Thanks to everyone involved in making tab dragging a reality, and especially to Sean for all the hard work to see the feature through to fruition!

(It’s been a busy day on the cvs server, as we’ve also landed other goodies such as middle-click support in the Bookmark Bar from Christopher Henderson, the toolbar icon for Tab Overview, with code from Stuart and the icon by Philippe Wittenbergh, and a handful of smaller patches.)

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